REVIEW: Air Strike (2018)

We’ll forego the ‘how much money does multimillionaire Bruce Willis need’ question and just get down to it, here’s another VOD movie with Walter_B that is extremely bad. So bad, it’s good, for the first twenty minutes which are replete with unintentional belly laughs. Then fatigue sets in and the remainder shifts to an interminable slog of awful. I really didn’t know it was possible to come up with such a turd on a budget of $65 million — among the top ten most expensive non-English movies ever made. In a lot of ways, it has to be seen to be believed.

Set in 1943 during the World War II, centres on the Japanese bombing of Chongqing and a group of five individuals who battle, mostly by air, to protect the south western Chinese city and an important piece of military hardware in it. Bruce Willis plays Jack, an American airman training the beleaguered recruits and offering fist-pumping motivational speeches. Before taking to the skies himself and screaming for joy in pitched dog fights that you would think would have been, y’know, intense and terrifying. But anyway…

Bruce Willis is actually in this movie a fair bit, at least compared to his other cameo-con appearances. Say, 30+ minutes. He’s also putting in an unusually vigorous performance, but maybe that has something to do with how much they paid him. But it doesn’t matter, because this film is horrific. Maybe what stands out most, or at least first, is the hilarious dubbing, like the old cheap martial arts movies from the 1970’s. The voice actors sound like they’re reading for the puppets from Team America, and at at times they speak with vigor while the actor’s mouth is sealed shut. Apparently while folks involved with this movie were getting caught up in tax evasion scandals, they didn’t even bother to check the audio mixing on it. I don’t blame them, it’s torture to look at this trash.

Because what about the heavy use of dime-store CGI, which is surely the worst to ever appear in any movie of this cost, or possibly even any movie ever made. The planes look so fake, you really have to check the trailer just to get a laugh at them, and that’s before the terrible movement animations and green screen work. At times, some practical effects kick in, where large ‘plumes of water’ in a lake are clearly thrown up out of some type of bathtub, like D-movies from the 1950’s. All combined, with the shocking Police Academy-tier acting and hokey dubbing, it would be funny if it didn’t get so tedious so quickly. I had to seriously pay attention repeatedly in order to establish whether or not this was satire.

Mel Gibson is a producer on this thing. I wonder if he’s even seen it. But it appears for every Operation Red Sea coming out of China as military propaganda, there might be a wretched Air Strike to back it up. Absolutely fucking woeful.